EOS Mainnet Finally Activates, A Decentralized Paradigm or Not

After turning the heads by raising about $4 billion in its ICO, EOS mainnet finally activated after a week of sluggish movement. With the aim to speed up the transactions vastly, the activation took its sweet time to be up and running.

Strong competition to Ethereum, decentralization of token distribution and having only 21 block producer have been the scenarios surrounding EOS. Currently transitioning to its mainnet, EOS price is in green.

EOS mainnet goes live

Finally, the required 15 percent votes are in and the world’s 5th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has gone live on its own blockchain. After a week-long wait for the mainnet activation, over 170 million votes rolled in to conclude the 21 block producers to process the transactions in EOS system.

By raising a whopping $4 billion in its recently concluded initial coin offering, EOS made a lot of headlines. This was when the system wasn’t even built yet.

Block.one, a startup is behind the development of this software. EOS’s CTO, Dan Larimer, has previously created Steemit, a crypto-powered publishing platform and BitShares which is a blockchain-based financial services platform.

Both of these platforms are based on a new consensus protocol called “delegated proof of stake” which is also used with EOS.

With the concept of block producers, EOS has dispensed mining while allowing the token holders to elect block producers. This system has been argued by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to be vulnerable to vote to buy as explained by him in a blog.

Also, read: Data Reveals Skewness In EOS Tokens Ownership

EOS voting scenario

Before coming onto its official blockchain, EOS tokens have been on ethereum blockchain. Because of this, these tokens were frozen a few weeks ago so that they can be transferred to the real chain. Now that the mainnet has been activated, they are unlocked.

The activation was dependent on a specific percentage of token staking that was 15% to elect the 21 block producers. the voting procedure needs the holder to use their private keys which were a prominent reason why it took so long for the voting to go through. Some holders didn’t have technical competency while others didn’t have the private keys as they were held in exchanges.

With the way the movement of the voting has been sluggish for the past week and jumped up in the past couple of days, it has also been hypothesized that holders of a large number of tokens were looking to whom others cast their votes.

Given the fact that top 100 addresses account for 75 percent of total distributed coins from which Block.one hold about 10 percent of the distributed tokens, the wealth is certainly concentrated among the few.

Aiming to solve the scaling issue, EOS plans to become a much powerful and capable platform for dApps than Ethereum. Now, with 21 block producers, EOS is also trying to become more decentralized.

Currently transitioning to its Main Net, EOS is up by 6.29 percent at $10.96 market value.

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